Friday, October 3, 2014

IBM introduced its latest generation Power servers built with its own POWER8 processor and NVIDIA's GPU.

The servers, which are optimized for the most demanding Big Data workloads, leverage the OpenPOWER stack for runing data-intensive tasks on the POWER8 processor while offloading other compute-intensive Big Data workloads to the NVIDIA GPU accelerators. The GPU is capable of running millions of data computations in parallel.

IBM will be tuning a number of its enterprise applications for this model, including the IBM DB2 database software with BLU Acceleration. Additionally, IBM is working to optimize Power versions of widely used GPU-accelerated applications for bioinformatics, defense, finance, molecular dynamics, weather modeling – including SOAP3, NAMD, GROMACS, FFTW library, and Quantum Espresso.

Guido Appenzeller, co-Founder of Big Switch Networks and CEO from 2010-2013, is headed to VMware, where he is expected to help direct the company's networking strategy. Previously, Appenzeller was an entrepreneur in residence at Morgenthaler and Consulting Professor at Stanford University.

Sprint has begun a new round of layoffs and will take a charge of approximately $160 million in the second fiscal quarter of 2014 for severance and related costs. In an SEC filing, Sprint said the workfouce reduction is expected to be largely completed by October 31, 2014 and will include certain management and non-management positions.